I don’t know Ariel Cooper. She (perhaps even that’s being presumptuous?) is a mystery to me. I’ve not seen her other work. I can find no examples of it online. Her self-published comics ‘zine Ghost Sickness contains no address indicating where she may be from. I literally know nothing about this artist. And yet —

Some work is so powerful that the idea of hewing to a “narrative” would hold it back not just conceptually, but physically. This is one such work, perhaps even a prime example of it. Cooper (or her stand-in) is born into this world from sickness, and from there — oh, dear whatever-god-you-believe-in, from there —

Dueling polarities of “fine” and “outsider” art create not so much an inexorable tension in this 12-page publication, but a mutually-generated gravitational pull, Cooper’s sublime self-referential imagery first firmly establishing its power and potential to subsume and overwhelm…